An interactive computer system has been developed for evaluating
cytologic features derived directly from a digital scan of breast fine
needle aspirate (FNA) slides.  The system uses computer vision
techniques to analyze cell nuclei and classifies them using an
inductive method based on linear programming.  A digital scan of
selected areas of the aspirate slide is done by a trained observer,
while the analysis of the digitized image is done by an untrained
observer.  When trained and tested on 119 breast FNAs (68 benign and
51 malignant) using leave-one-out testing, 90\% correctness was
achieved.  These results indicate that the method is
accurate (good intra- and interobserver reproducibility) and that an untrained
operator can obtain diagnostic results comparable to those achieved
visually by experienced observers.